FSSAI clarifies on dahilabel after South protests
Business Standard
|March 31, 2023
The food safety regulator on Thursday allowed the use of vernacular words for curd printed on packets, after protests in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over usage of the term dahi threatened to sour business in a region with a long history of resistance to the imposition of Hindi.
An official of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) told Business Standard that its directive to use dahi on packets across the country has been clarified. Food business operators or FBOS (mainly milk cooperatives and curd manufacturers) will now be allowed to use the linguistic equivalents such as dahi (Hindi), mosaru (Kannada), zaamut daud (Kashmiri), thayir (Tamil) and perugu (Telugu), along with the English "curd".
A day earlier, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin objected that the printed label spelling dahi was an attempt to impose Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states. "The unabashed insistences of #Hindi Imposition have come to the extent of directing us to label even a curd packet in Hindi, relegating Tamil and Kannada in our own states. Such brazen disregard to our mother tongues will make sure those responsible are banished from the South forever," he tweeted.
State president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) K Annamalai, too demanded a rollback of the FSSAI directive.
This story is from the March 31, 2023 edition of Business Standard.
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